The Element client will register your client with their push notification system (even if self hosted). It will attach data to your session on your homeserver of where the homeserver should send notifications of new messages for APNS, FireBase, or UnifiedPush. The respective notification pipeline will wake up your device, and inform Element of the new messages, and display them accordingly on your device.
Android + Apple OS only listen to their respective ecosystem's push notification system, in order to minimize battery drain + needed background services on their phones.
Element has a push server to send to Apple + Google's offerings:
You can configure Element to use ntfy, or some other unifiedpush implementation, but (a) this is hopeless on stock iOS devices since apple severely limits what background services can do (b) this is frustrating on Android because there is inconsistent handling of background services.
Since I use android, I've taken option (b), and it's worked mostly okay, because I've figured out the specific magic spell for my OnePlus phone to leave the background ntfy service alone, and I'm willing to eat the extra battery to have one more service running in the background.
Android + Apple OS only listen to their respective ecosystem's push notification system, in order to minimize battery drain + needed background services on their phones.
Element has a push server to send to Apple + Google's offerings:
https://ems-docs.element.io/books/element-support/page/under...
You can configure Element to use ntfy, or some other unifiedpush implementation, but (a) this is hopeless on stock iOS devices since apple severely limits what background services can do (b) this is frustrating on Android because there is inconsistent handling of background services.
Since I use android, I've taken option (b), and it's worked mostly okay, because I've figured out the specific magic spell for my OnePlus phone to leave the background ntfy service alone, and I'm willing to eat the extra battery to have one more service running in the background.